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This Top 20 entrant is not a company registered in India. It’s a
marketing office of Intel Asia Electronics, Inc, Hong Kong. There is a
subsidiary called Intel Technology India Pvt Ltd*, but for design and
development.
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Intel’s global Intel Inside campaign’s success has been matched in India
by its channel program. While OEMs buy 30 percent of its chips, two-thirds sell
through five distributors and downstream dealers. And that reflects the
benchmark Genuine Intel Dealer program, which brought brand and structure into a
cottage industry of white-box assemblers. Some 2,000 dealers get GID benefits,
from training and brand use to specific support, such as a program under which
some of them assembled 2,500 laptops last year.
And last year saw a consumer thrust begin in emerging markets (30 lower-tier
cities) with weekend promos and ‘digital PC parties’, and ‘GID vans with
walk-in P4 demos for 90 towns.
Another push was around the Itanium, Intel’s 64-bit key to the enterprise.
The processor is a fifth of systems value, while Intel’s revenues are a tenth
of the Indian systems market. For Intel is a player only in volume low-end
servers with Pentium and Xeon chips. The real enterprise stuff is all on
high-value big-iron from IBM, Sun, et al. Which is what Intel has tried to
change, in the mind of the CIO.
It did not work last year. Few Itanium servers sold. Now there’s the new
power-packed Itanium 2. But its all uphill still, with early versions of
software. Microsoft’s barely crossed beta with its Itanium server OS, and CIOs
don’t like to test-run their enterprises on early-release OSs.
Other activities: The Bangalore development center doubled its strength. And
the Intel ‘Teach to the Future’ program trained 75,000 teachers in two
years, hoping they’ll help catalyze PC use in schools.
Now, this near-monopoly chipmaker needs to watch its turf. AMD and Via have
moved from near-zero to 15 percent of the market, and are stepping into Intel’s
stronghold: the distribution channels. That, and the enterprise, is where the
chip wars will be fought this year.